Bloodwitch

by Susan Dennard

By the time the woman had stuffed his purchases in a homespun satchel and tallied up what he owed on the assignment ledger—two tier ones, a tier two, and a tier four—rain beat down outside.

  He did not say good-bye when he left.

  * * *

  Aeduan changed into his new uniform in the outpost baths. Breeches, undershirt, brigandine, belt and baldric, and finally, the Painstone dangling from a leather thong. Not until he tucked it beneath his clothes and it touched his chest did he feel the effects of the magic.

  Between one heartbeat and the next, rain and storm and shouts from the outpost battered against him. The world sharpened, a flood of color and light. And the pain—it fled back like rain sucked into sand. Aeduan could breathe. He could see, and it crashed into him so fast, he almost fell against the nearest wall.

  By the Wells, he was reborn.

  Hands braced on the bricks, Aeduan inhaled until his lungs pressed against his ribs. Only now could he truly comprehend how much pain there had been. How much his spine had furled since last night. How much he had stumbled and slurred and fought to stay conscious.

  He exhaled, savoring how free the air felt, how easily his muscles now moved. Then he inhaled once more, and this time, he summoned his magic. It roared to life, no skips or skitters. Monk and acolyte blood-scents clamored against him, each as unique and distinctive as the bodies and minds they belonged to.

  Back through the cloister, now empty, he trekked. Rain pelted the crops. Mist clogged the covered walkway, and by the time he entered the crowded common room, where available assignments were nailed to the wall, lightning splintered overhead.

  In the back of his mind, it occurred to Aeduan that this was an unseasonable thunderstorm. Particularly since Tirla so rarely saw them.

  Inside the common room, the plank walls were divided into ten sections. Directly to Aeduan’s left was tier one, and slips of paper covered every surface—not so different from the old way. Short-term contracts, he supposed, would also pay the least. Tier two and three were almost as heavily papered, yet rather than the typical cluster of monks poring over assignments at these lower levels, every monk in the room was glued to the right side.

  Tier ten.

  White cloaks, some dripping, some dry, blended together as each person leaned in close, craning to read an assignment staked to the wood. Whatever it was, it must be worth a lot of money. In the past, Aeduan would have marched straight for it, shoving aside the others and pleased when they glared and called him demon. Today, though, he simply aimed for the left.

  Two tier ones, a tier two, and a tier four. As he scanned the scraps of paper, written in all hands and varied languages, he found his wrists had started rolling. Round and round and round again. Standing here, choosing from assignments—reading about overdue debts and missing livestock, about seafire requisitions or short-term guard postings near the border—was exactly why he had taken that position with Guildmaster Yotiluzzi two years ago. He had wanted the coin; he had wanted to leave.

  You could leave now, his mind nudged. Take the items and never pay. After all, he had no loyalty to the Monastery. No plans to ever return. But … there were uses to the opal in his ear. To the cloak upon his back. There were uses to these outposts too, and if he did not pay his debts, those uses would be denied.

  He plucked two tier ones off the wall. Both were near the city; both could be handled before tomorrow’s dawn even brightened the sky.

  “You surprise me, Bloodwitch.”

  Aeduan’s jaw ticced. He did not need to turn to know who now stood beside him. Speed and daisy chains, mother’s kisses and sharpened steel.

  “Not going for the tier ten?”

  Slowly, Aeduan turned to face Lizl. Her amber brown skin glistened with rainwater. Her white cloak dripped to the floor. She was tall, but he refused to lift his chin to meet her eyes. He simply rolled his gaze upward, expression flat, and said, “No.”

  “Why not?” She offered a smug grin, arms folding casually. Her posture was misleading in its ease. She was the best mercenary monk out of the hundreds at the Monastery.

  Except for Aeduan. He still had her beat.

  “Ten thousand talers.” She counted off a single finger. Then a second and a third finger as she added, “Plus twenty thousand piestras and twenty-five thousand cleques. That’s enough money to buy a kingdom, and it’s an open assignment, too.”

  Open assignments meant anyone could try to complete them, and they remained open until they were done. There had never been one in all of Aeduan’s years of mercenary work. Nor had he ever heard of one with such a high price attached.

  It did not change his mind, though.

  “I have no interest.”

  “Good. Because I intend to do it.”

  “I do not care.”

  “You should.” She laughed, a sound like breaking glass. “So beware, Bloodwitch, because if you cross my path again, I will destroy you.” With a parting smirk she spun around—cloak spraying Aeduan with rain—and stalked from the common room.

  Aeduan did not watch her go. Like everything else around here, she had not changed at all in two years. Never mind that he had not crossed her path on purpose, that he had no interest in the tier ten, and never mind that she could not destroy him even if she wanted to. Lizl hated him; she had always hated him; she always would.

  In a flurry of speed, Aeduan grabbed the first assignments he saw on the tier two and tier four walls. Then he left the common room and its huddled monks to finish what he had come here to do: he went to the Shrine of the Fallen.

  Underground, as all Carawen shrines were, rain dripped down the steps leading from the cloister. A puddle splashed at the bottom. Thunder chased behind. Aeduan followed a tunnel deeper into the earth, until at last he reached the stone room, a miniature version of the massive underground catacombs at the Monastery. Low, vaulted ceilings flickered with candlelight, while the black marble hexagon at the heart of the room absorbed all light.

  As wide as Aeduan was tall, the marble slab reached his mid-thigh. Four monks knelt around it, each reciting their vows at their own speed. Aeduan had no plans to join them. He had not known the man who had died. He wanted this errand complete.

  A fifth monk stepped from the shadows. It was required that all monks serve at a Shrine of the Fallen for a year, and most waited until old age before fulfilling the duty. This monk, though, was young. Perhaps no more than a decade past Aeduan.

  “Are you here to pay your respects?” she asked. “Or report?”

  “Report.” He withdrew the dead man’s opal from his pocket. “I do not know the monk’s name. I found him a day south of Tirla. An artisanal monk, caught in a battle.”

  The woman sighed, a sound laden with regret, and plucked the opal from Aeduan’s palm. “It is the tier ten.” She frowned at the gem. “It is taking our lives one by one. A hundred of us have fallen trying to finish it.” Her gaze cut back to Aeduan’s. Piercing. Desperate, even. “No fortune is worth one’s life, Monk. Remember that.”

  Then she bowed her head respectfully and melted once more into the shadows.

  * * *

  Aeduan returned to the common room. Curiosity propelled him. Curiosity and something harder—something almost like certainty, though he could not say how he knew.

  It roiled in his gut. It made his strides slice long against the rain.

  He had to shove through the monks clustered before the wall. Some snarled, some glared, just like the old days—and just like the old days, they all withdrew when they saw the blood swirling across Aeduan’s eyes.

  Bloodwitch, they whispered. A demon from the Void.

  Then Aeduan reached the lone paper staked to the planks. Such a simple beige sheet for such important words, and nailed above it were two more papers listing payments, as if the bounty had been increased not once but twice since first arriving.

  SEVENTEEN

  The early-evening sun bore down while Safi trailed the Empress of Marstok and Habim besid
e Lake Scarza. Naval ships groaned against their tethers and white sails floated for as far as the eye could see. Thousands of boats, yet still only a fraction of the full Marstoki forces. Most, Safi had learned, were moored on the southern coast or already at sea.

  After Vivia Nihar’s departure, Safi and Vaness had traveled with Habim to the northernmost tip of the lake, where the navy kept their main headquarters. Safi had changed into an Adder uniform: black tunic, loose black pants, and supple black ankle boots. The only difference between Safi’s uniform and the other Adders’ was that the iron belt at her waist carried no weapons, and she did not have to wear the headscarf. Yet.

  Rokesh and eleven other Adders moved around the group, spaced wide enough apart to allow Vaness to move unimpeded along the wide sandstone bulwark that overlooked the main docks.

  “The Cartorrans want your Truthwitch,” Habim said matter-of-factly. Hands clasped behind his back, he examined sailors no differently than he had examined Safi and Iseult growing up. “Emperor Henrick grows bolder each day, Your Majesty. He taunts us, trying to see how close he can get before we attack.”

  “And when they do get too close,” Vaness responded, no change in her iron stride, “then we will kill them.”

  True, true, true.

  “No,” Habim countered, “we will not.” He slowed to a stop, forcing Safi and the Adders to slow as well. “If we escalate the conflict, it will only give Cartorra—and Dalmotti—a reason to escalate as well. We are not ready for that, Your Majesty. We may be large, well organized, and well supplied, but that does not mean we will win.

  “The bulk of your troops are Children of the Truce. They have no grasp of what war looks like, no understanding of what’s at stake, and little reason to care.”

  Safi’s chest frizzed with the truth in that assertion—and it brought to mind a similar statement made on a similar evening only a month before. You have no idea what war is like, Uncle Eron had said.

  And he had been right. Safi saw that now. She too was also a Child of the Truce.

  As if on cue, an officer marched by on a lower parapet. He barked orders to a flag-bearer toting the standard. A young flag-bearer, not old enough to yet have whiskers. Not old enough to have even grown into his feet.

  Safi winced at the sight of him; Habim simply sniffed; Vaness showed no reaction at all.

  Moments later, they resumed walking, so Safi resumed following. They now discussed ground forces and supply chains, river routes and highway checkpoints. All subjects Safi had been forced to study—under Habim’s tutelage, no less—but for which Iseult had always been the better student.

  Safi had known Habim her entire life, yet the man she trod solemnly behind was not the man she’d grown up with.

  There were similarities, of course. The impatience that always cropped his words or the stillness on his face when he was displeased—that was Habim through and through. But everything else was new to Safi, from the stiff green-coated uniform with gold tassels to the way everyone bowed low at him. Above all, it was the references he made to places and past events that Safi had never heard of, but that resonated with trembling truth.

  Was there any part of Safi’s life that had not been a lie? And how had she, the only Truthwitch on the entire continent, never once suspected?

  At a warship with gleaming gold decks and scrabbling sailors in green, Habim and Vaness paused. In less time than it took Safi to wipe the sweat off her brow, two pages rushed in with a table and set it between Habim and the Empress. Then they scurried away while Habim removed a paper from his coat. After plunking two stones on either side to weigh it down, he motioned Vaness closer.

  “This is a map of northwestern Marstok and the Sirmayan Mountains,” he explained. “Here you can see the main watchtowers. These three mountain passes must be better protected. A loss of any one of these towers will cut off supplies to Tirla. The city would fall within a week.”

  Heat splintered in Safi’s shoulder blades. A warning of duplicity, and suddenly she was very alert and very keen to join this conversation. Neck craning, she tried to glimpse the lines and Xs Habim traced for the Empress. Yet all she saw was the map, exactly as described.

  Except … the longer she stared, the more her vision seemed to blur. She scrubbed her eyes before squinting once more at the page.

  And her magic blared hotter, scratching over her skull now. False, false, false. Then the map vanished entirely.

  Somehow, Safi managed not to react. Somehow, she kept a bored, tired expression tacked in place. Her mind, however, was alight. And her heels—oh, how her heels suddenly wanted to bounce and carry her closer to the table.

  Instead, she yawned. A great stretching of her jaw that would have earned a scolding as a child. She pretended to hide it. Pretended to turn away from the Empress, all while swishing just a few inches sideways. Then a few inches nearer to the table. Another yawn, another stretch.

  Now the map was fully in view, and now she could see that it was no map at all.

  It was a message.

  Do nothing. We have a plan.

  That was all it said. Safi read it three more times, but there was nothing else. In Mathew’s familiar scrawl—on a document clearly Wordwitched—there were only six words: Do nothing. We have a plan.

  Hell-ruttin’ weasel pies. Safi couldn’t decide if she ought to laugh or cry at the message. Because really, Habim? He was really telling her to keep doing what she had already been doing, and he really expected her to just wait around for some unknown plan?

  Safi had followed her uncle’s plan in Veñaza City, and it hadn’t ended well. Twenty years in the making, a scheme that spanned the Witchlands, that was meant to stop the war from resuming and bring permanent peace to the empires—Safi had ruined it all in one night. Oh, she had done as ordered and followed the plan across the Jadansi on Merik Nihar’s ship, but then circumstances had forced her to deviate. Namely, her uncle’s ridiculous, unfair treaty with Nubrevna. And that deviation had landed her here, in Marstok.

  It wasn’t her fault, though. It was the fault of a shoddy scheme with too many moving parts, as well as the fact that no one ever told her what in damnation was going on.

  And Safi especially wanted to know about Iseult. Safi wanted to know where in the Witchlands her Threadsister was. She wanted to know if Iseult was safe. And above all, she wanted to know how Habim intended to get her and Safi together again.

  “Nomatsis,” she said, but Vaness and Habim only ignored her, continuing their discussion of winter snows and transport. So Safi repeated a bit louder and more emphatically, “Nomatsis.”

  This time, Vaness broke off. “What is the problem?” She offered the faintest glare Safi’s way. “What about Nomatsis?”

  “You currently provide space for their tribes to congregate outside cities.” Without asking for permission, Safi strutted to the table, chin high. Her shadow stretched across the map, and she tapped where she thought Tirla had been. “Where will they go in the war, Your Majesty? What will you do to ensure that they are not targets of the empires?”

  Vaness regarded Safi. The iron shackles at her wrists slithered and spun. The breeze off Lake Scarza wisped against her hair.

  “Many Nomatsi tribes,” she said eventually, “have moved to the Raider King’s banner. They need no protection from me, Safi. If anything, this makes them the enemy.”

  “But not all tribes,” she countered. “And perhaps they wouldn’t go to him if they felt they were safer here to begin with.”

  “Hmmm.” The iron shackles slowed. Then she twisted back to Habim. “She makes a valid point, General. Have you accounted for Nomatsi tribes? How do you intend to protect them?”

  Safi had to fight off a grin. Yes, have you accounted for Nomatsis, Habim? Have you accounted for Iseult?

  His nostrils flared. “Twenty years ago, I protected their tribes and everyone else within our borders. I will protect them again, and it insults me that you would assume otherwise.” Habim’s focus
never left Vaness as he said this, but his words sparkled in Safi’s rib cage—as true as true could be.

  “Does the Truthwitch”—now Habim looked at Safi with daggers in his eyes—“have any other questions?”

  “No.” She bared her toothiest grin. “I think your strategy is a sound one, General.”

  He visibly bristled, weight shifting, lips puckering. And relief chuckled through Safi that even as Firewitch general and court Truthwitch, Habim still found her insufferable.

  “It is good to know that farm life has not softened you, General.” Vaness offered these words calmly. Almost lightly, as if she joked.

  Habim, however, did not take them that way. “Farm life,” he snapped, “is as difficult as soldiering, Your Majesty, and it would do well for an empress to remember that.”

  Before Safi could blink, the iron at Vaness’s wrists shot to the general’s throat. Two crescent blades against his neck. In that same instant, the Adders unsheathed their blowguns and took aim.

  Then everyone waited. Officers patrolling the lower levels gaped upward. The page boys ogled with slack jaws. Even the sails and the masts and the creaking, moaning warships seemed to hold their collective breaths.

  “It would do better,” Vaness said with all the force of her title and her magic behind her words, “for a general to remember his station.”

  Habim swallowed. “Forgive me, Your Majesty. Farm life has softened me, it seems.”

  “See that you harden yourself quickly then, or next time my blades will see just how soft you have become.”

  With that promise to linger between them, the blades slithered back to Vaness’s wrists. Then she left the table and her general behind, offering no good-bye nor acknowledgment of Habim’s low bow.

  In seconds, blowguns still ready, the Adders closed in tightly around Vaness and Safi, and in seconds, the mentor Safi had never truly known was out of sight.

  EIGHTEEN

  It was not the first time Iseult had been alone with Owl. It was, however, the first time they had been alone without Blueberry there to distract the girl. It was also the first time she had been alone with her in a crowded place, and Iseult was keen to obey the innkeeper’s orders: Don’t make any trouble.